Articles

Weizmann Hamilton, Democratic Socialist Movement (CWI in South Africa),
from Socialism Today, magazine of the Socialist Party (CWI in England &
Wales)

ANC leadership has shown since the massacre that the gulf between it and
the masses is now unbridgeable

The six-week Marikana strike ended on 18 September. The miners
accepted a 22% pay rise and a 2,000 rand payment for loss of earnings
during the strike. This is less than the miners’ original demand, but
was celebrated as a victory after the ANC government tried to crush the
strike with lethal repression.

It is a victory, not just for the Lonmin workers but for the
general strike, without which the employer would not have come to the
table. The Lonmin bosses had to recognise the power of the workers to
organise themselves independently of them or their stooges.

Cosatu leader Zwelinzima Vavi warned against the spread of
‘chaos’, and president Jacob Zuma insisted that the ANC is “the only
force that has the interests of our people at heart”. But the Marikana
strike – and the massacre – has sparked a much wider movement that will
send shockwaves through the ANC and Cosatu.

Strikes have spread to other mines, and Zuma claims the industry
has lost $548 million (£337 million). Around 15,000 miners are still on
strike at Gold Fields, while Anglo American Platinum was forced to close
its mines last week following huge protests by Amplats miners.

The day after the mine bosses were forced to concede to the
Marikana miners, the ANC-directed repression continued: police used tear
gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets against workers protesting at the
Sondela squatter camp near an Anglo American mine. The battle lines are
being drawn for colossal struggles to come. And the political
reverberations will continue to rock the country like the aftershocks of
an earthquake, and will alter the political landscape forever.

Postscript 19 Sept

The scenes of armed South African police gunning down striking
miners brought back memories of the brutality of the old apartheid
regime. Today, however, big business is sheltering behind the state run
by the African National Congress. But the repression has unleashed a
massive movement. WEIZMANN HAMILTON reports on the significance of this
new upturn in workers’ struggle.

AT THE END of July the signing of a three-year salary agreement between
the government and the public-sector unions was greeted with relief and
hailed as historic. The possibility of a repeat of the massive
public-sector strikes of 2007 and 2010 had been averted for the next
three years and labour stability would be the order of the day, in one
of the most combative sectors of the working class in recent years. The
effectiveness of the labour-relations system of South Africa’s 18-year
old democracy had been proven, it was claimed.

Two weeks later, an earthquake erupted at Marikana that has dealt a
shattering blow to the credibility of that labour-relations system, to
the institutions for the resolution of disputes, and also to the very
foundation of the negotiated settlement that ended apartheid and ushered
in black majority rule in 1994. Like the brilliant lightning that
accompanies a Highveld thunderstorm, the irreconcilable antagonisms
between the working class and the capitalists, the unbridgeable gulf
between the exploiters and the exploited, have been laid bare at
Marikana. As has the role of the state, the armed bodies which protect
the wealth of the ruling capitalist class, and the role of the
government as the facilitator of the exploitation and oppression of the
working class.

Starting in Rustenburg in the North West Province, the molten lava of
workers’ rage is flowing across the platinum mines. The province is home
to 80% of the world’s platinum reserves, exploited by some of the
biggest mining companies in the world. The anger, detonated by the
bloody massacre of 34 workers by the police on Wonderkop hill, Marikana,
is threatening to engulf the gold mines in Gauteng, the industrial
heartland of the country.

The considerable political impact of the 2007 public-sector strike,
which prepared the way for the recall of the African National Congress’s
then-president, Thabo Mbeki, opened up the biggest divisions in the ANC
since its foundation one hundred years ago. But that pales in comparison
with the impact of the rebellion of the mineworkers triggered by the
Marikana uprising. Strewn among the rubble left by these
earth-shattering events lie the credibility of the National Union of
Mineworkers (NUM), its parent federation, the Congress of South African
Trade Unions (Cosatu), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and,
above all, the ruling ANC itself.

It was the 2010 public-sector strike that first revealed sharply that
the shotgun marriage between the organised working class and the Jacob
Zuma faction of the ANC had been a completely false union between the
political elite in the service of capital and the victims of the
ruthless exploitation of the capitalist class. It was in that strike
that the Zuma administration first demonstrated its real anti-working
class character, with a venomous torrent of abuse by ministers,
denouncing the strikers as thugs, criminals and murderers. Mass
dismissals of health workers (later rescinded) accompanied threats to
ban the right to strike in whole swathes of the public sector, including
health, education, the police and army. If the ANC government sheathed
its sword in the battle with the public-sector workers in 2010, it
wielded it with a vengeance this year against the Marikana miners.

Brutal company

THE FIRST CASUALTY of war, whether of the military or the civil kind
(for that is what the tumultuous conflict in the mines represent in
outline), is the truth. The propaganda machine staffed by the media,
government, bosses, SACP and, most scandalously, the NUM, went into
overdrive to claim that the police acted in self-defence. Not only has
that been exposed as utterly false but it has been shown to have been
consciously calculated to conceal the now undeniable truth: that the
Marikana massacre was premeditated.

The Lonmin company which runs the mine has a strong pedigree of
brutality in the virtual police state it has established on its mines.
Private security forces and the police serve the mining bosses and act
with impunity. The deaths that occurred before the massacre, which
claimed the lives of six workers, two policemen and two security guards,
were the direct result of the culture of violence that the company has
cultivated over the years.

Lonmin itself is a descendant of the notorious London-based Lonrho,
which even Britain’s former Tory prime minister, Ted Heath, described as
“an unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism” in the House of
Commons in 1973. Mmegionline pointed out (24 August), that Lonrho’s
chief executive, Tiny Rowland, spread corruption throughout Africa as it
exploited the continent’s workforce.

The strike was triggered by the bosses’ decision to grant wage increases
to selected groups of workers to prevent them, rumour has it, from
defecting to other companies offering higher rates of pay in a sector
with no centralised bargaining or uniform remuneration. These increases
breached a two-year agreement signed with the NUM and due to end in
2013. Seeing this as an attempt to create divisions, and with the
two-year agreement effectively set aside by management with the apparent
acquiescence of the NUM, the workers, acting independently, put forward
a single pay demand to unite the workforce against the bosses. The NUM’s
impotence in the face of these developments had infuriated the workers,
and reopened the wounds of the NUM’s betrayal of the Lonmin workers last
year. A committee was formed independently of the NUM.

During the NUM’s 2011 shop stewards elections, the workers had voted out
the majority of the old committee, and replaced them with their
preferred candidates. The NUM regional office rejected the elections as
‘unconstitutional’ and refused to recognise the new committee. Instead
of attempting to resolve the matter with their members, NUM regional
leaders informed management that the structure had not been recognised.

When management refused to deal with the committee, the workers rejected
this attempt to interfere with their democratic will and, in effect, to
dictate to them who they may or may not elect. They, then, went on
strike. The NUM distanced itself from the strike, and 9,000 workers were
dismissed for striking illegally. Such was the anger of the workers that
NUM leaders addressed their own members from inside an armoured police
vehicle, ignoring demands to step out and face them.

Preparing for a showdown

CONTRARY TO THE parallel myth that this summer’s dispute was the fallout
from rivalry between the NUM and the breakaway Association of
Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu), the strike committee was
established independently of both unions. In fact, the first
pre-massacre killings took place when the independent strike committee
approached the NUM office to discuss unity in action. Two of the
delegates were shot and killed from the direction of the NUM office.
Police and private security were sent in to suppress the independent
workers’ committee and prevent the strike from taking off. Precisely
what the circumstances were of the killings of the police and security
guards remains unclear. Despite this, the killings were used as a
pretext to demonise the workers as bloodthirsty and intent on sowing
mindless mayhem.

Recognising that they were vulnerable in the mineshafts, the workers
decided to move off the mine premises and to occupy Wonderkop hill. It
was, in other words, an act of self-defence not aggression. Workers,
however, had had a sense of foreboding for days before the massacre. It
was their vulnerability, their determination to maintain unity that led
to them resorting to superstitious rituals and the use of muti
(traditional medicine). It was intended to convey a message of
determination, that they would stand their ground in the face of
management and police threats, rather than a genuine belief among the
majority that the muti could render them invisible.

Management’s arrogant hard-line attitude and contemptuous dismissal of
the workers’ demands, together with the aggressive deployment of mine
security and the previous killings, indicated that a bloody showdown was
being prepared. Workers armed themselves with the only things they had
at their disposal, traditional weapons which are wielded by virtually
all workers during strikes, and which are hardly weapons of war. They
had one simple demand: that management meet them and respond to their
grievances.

By 15 August, public pressure had reached the point where management,
the NUM and Amcu were obliged to appear on national radio and publicly
agree to start negotiations the following day, even announcing that they
had an offer to table. On the fateful day, management arrived 90 minutes
after the appointed time, only to announce, according to Amcu, that
there would be no negotiations and, chillingly, “that the matter was now
in the hands of the generals”. (There has been an apartheid-style
re-militarisation of the police, and shoot-to-kill philosophy
popularised by former police commissioner, Bheki Cele, who has been
sacked for corruption.)

The Amcu leaders made one last, futile effort to persuade the workers to
come down from the hill, warning them that blood was going to be
spilled. In fact, by the time the Amcu leaders were meeting with the
workers the clock for the massacre was already ticking. Amcu leaders
report that they were allowed to leave the hill only after lengthy
negotiations with senior police officials. The plotters of the massacre
had been prepared to include the Amcu leaders in the slaughter. Not long
after the Amcu leaders had vacated the hill, the massacre began.

Executing the massacre

CLEARLY, A DECISION had been made to drown the strike in blood. It could
not have been taken by Lonmin management or the police alone. The
government must have been consulted at the highest level. In this single
act is laid bare the essence of the class basis of capitalist rule: the
police as protectors of the wealth and power of the capitalists; the
government as the political attorneys and facilitators of the
exploitation of the workers by the bosses; the union leaders as the
collaborators of the bosses and the government in keeping the workers
bound hand-and-foot on their behalf. In that act, too, the umbilical
cord of the masses’ illusions in the ANC government was severed.

What has since emerged is that the main massacre occurred 300 metres
from the site television cameras were trained on, at a smaller hill to
which workers had fled. There is evidence that they were shot
execution-style, as they raised their hands in surrender, or in the back
as they fled.

At most, the workers were in possession of one pistol, possibly from
disarming a police officer or security guard at the mine in the days
before. Beyond that, the workers had nothing more than panga knives,
knobkerries, sjambok whips and other traditional paraphernalia that
posed no threat to police with automatic weapons. Armed police, with
armoured vehicles and helicopters, tear gas and razor-wire deploying
machines, mounted an operation that was designed to clear the hill,
force the workers back to work, and break the strike.

It did not occur on the spur of the moment. It was planned. The razor
wire was deployed deliberately to allow for a small gap, tempting the
workers to rush towards it. Those who did so were mowed down in a
murderous hail of bullets. Subsequent accounts presented the attempt to
escape from the hill as an attempted assault on the police.

Declaring class war

THE LONMIN STRIKE occurred against the background of a mounting crisis
in the industry. The global economic slowdown has caused a crisis in the
motor industry, with levels of overcapacity that would require a market
the size of the US to bring all idle plant into operation. Platinum
extraction, completely dependent on the motor industry’s need for
catalytic converters, was an inevitable casualty. Supply rapidly
outstripped demand, aggravated by the greed of speculators who worsened
oversupply to the point that platinum plunged to just 50% of its
historic price. Lonmin’s share price has taken a serious knock and the
company will miss its production targets for this year.

Nonetheless, the reality is that the halt in production has changed the
balance between supply and demand, resulting in an increase in the price
of platinum. In that sense, the company is not threatened by the loss of
production. Why then did management, the police and the government feel
the need to crush the strike? The reason is that, by embarking on a
strike, the workers were challenging more than their exploitation. They
were rising up against the entire establishment, and the carefully
engineered system of collective bargaining designed to trap workers in
endless procedural technicalities to avoid going on an ‘unprotected’,
that is, illegal strike.

The strike was illegal in that it did not follow procedure. The existing
two-year agreement signed by the NUM and management was ignored by both
the signatories and the workers. The NUM leaders were being rejected and
denounced as management stooges. Worse still from the NUM’s point of
view, in self-defence workers armed themselves with traditional weapons
– useful, at best, in close combat – as a symbol of unity, determination
and combativity. The entire system of oppression, on which the continued
exploitation of the workers depended, was at risk. The bosses were
outraged at the ingratitude of workers no longer prepared to walk around
in chains, to live in squalor, and to be treated like slaves.

This was no mere wage strike. It was an unarmed insurrection. That
certainly was the view taken by the Lonmin bosses and the entire
capitalist class in the mining industry and beyond. In an extraordinary
editorial on 17 August, Business Day issued what amounted to a
declaration of class war against the Marikana workers. It spelt out in
clear language the political implications of the workers’ action and why
it was intolerable. It appealed for class unity across the entire
capitalist class. In language breath-taking for its forthrightness,
shorn of the normal euphemisms about the common interest of all South
Africans united across classes in the common endeavour to achieve
prosperity, the editorial condemned the inaction of the Lonmin
management:

“Lonmin needs to be a part of the solution to an intractable problem at
the mine. It isn’t new. The new Association of Mineworkers and
Construction Union (Amcu) is slowly taking apart the venerable National
Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in the platinum industry, mine after mine.
That fact, on its own, should be enough to raise alarm bells throughout
the South African body politic. The NUM is the thoughtful, considered
heart of the union movement here. Cyril Ramaphosa [former NUM leader,
now big-businessman] and Kgalema Motlanthe [South African deputy
president], for instance, come out of it. As a union it is a powerful
voice of reason in an often loud and rash movement.

“It appreciates and values private capital and strong companies.
Business everywhere should be hoping the union finds a way to defend
itself effectively from Amcu’s attacks… For a start, the strike is
ostensibly about pay, an issue neither the police nor the unions can
solve. Second, business, just for the sake of it, needs to be seen to
stand up at a moment of crisis like this in South Africa and be damned
well counted.

“The strike and the tragedy of Thursday will be with us for a very long
time. It represented a failure of our new society on many levels, most
strikingly the inability of the majority black establishment (of which
the NUM and the ruling African National Congress and union umbrella
Cosatu are leaders) to come to terms with the majority of black,
marginalised, poor and desperate people.

“Amcu was bred around beer and fires in deepest rural Pondoland in the
Transkei… There is not going to be any stopping Amcu. That means a
solution to the violence has to be found at a high level, and that it
has to recognise, for the NUM and for Cosatu and the ANC itself, the
extremely uncomfortable truth that there is a power building in the land
over which they have little or no influence, and which itself has little
or no respect for the powers that be”.

Fault-lines in the power structure

HERE IN UNDILUTED language, without even a crocodile tear to blot the
paper on which it was written for the deaths of 34 human beings, is how
the bourgeois view the situation. As far as they are concerned, the
Marikana workers are a threat to the entire edifice constructed at
Codesa (the Convention for a Democratic South Africa: the negotiations
to dismantle the apartheid regime). That brought in an arrangement by
which the economic dictatorship of the capitalist class and exploitation
of the working class would be perpetuated under a democratic mask held
in place by the Tripartite Alliance of the ANC, SACP and Cosatu. In 300
bloody seconds, that mask had been ripped away with pointless savagery
by the ‘democratic’ police.

In its paranoid, panicky reaction to the spread of the strikes, the
government, Cosatu and the SACP has sought to blame Julius Malema,
expelled ANC Youth League president, for instigating workers and
destabilising the country. They have also attacked him for meeting with
disgruntled soldiers, accusing him of threatening the security of the
country. As a result, all military bases were placed on high alert. But,
as Malema himself pointed out, he is out to save the ANC not destroy it.
If he had not stepped in, he argues, the vacuum would have been filled
by others with a different agenda.

Malema has his eye on the ANC’s Mangaung conference in December,
preparations for which have already polarised the ANC over the
succession to the presidency. It has been plunged into a virtual civil
war and a factional strife far worse than the one that preceded the
ousting of Mbeki. Malema hopes to be reinstated by the floor of the
conference. So deep are the divisions in the ANC that another split
along the lines of 2007, which led to the emergence of Cope (Congress of
the People), cannot be excluded. Whatever the outcome of the December
conference, however, it will make no difference to the working class.

As the entire conduct of the ANC leadership has shown since the
massacre, the gulf between it and the masses is now unbridgeable. The
Business Day editorial may have attacked Amcu. The real target, however,
was not Amcu, which is a mere accidental phenomenon with no real
alternative to offer the workers. As Lenin would have put it, Business
Day was striking the bag to hit the donkey. Its target was the working
class. The ANC has demonstrated that it shares with the capitalist class
the same fear and loathing for the working class.

The Democratic Socialist Movement (the CWI section in South Africa) has
played an important role in the struggle of the Marikana miners, helping
to set up the Rustenburg Workers and Communities Forum. The struggle for
justice for the Marikana miners and the families of those killed and
injured by the security forces is the top priority. The pressure has to
be increased on the Lonmin company, the police and the political
establishment. DSM members are proposing a Rustenburg general strike, to
be followed by a national strike and march. International pressure by
workers and activists must also be maximised. The enthusiastic response
to the ideas of the DSM among workers indicates the great potential for
the development of a mass workers’ party on a socialist programme, to
defend the interests of working-class people in South Africa.